• Entry Servers: IBM i Versus Windows Server, Redux

  April 10, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  No comparison between similar but different things is ever perfect. It is the nature of language, constructed of similes and metaphors, as well as science, which speaks in generalities but craves ever-finer precision. It is no different when trying to compare different system platforms, which we do quite often around here at The Four Hundred and have for three and a half decades.

  The comparison between the Power S1022s running IBM i and a Dell PowerEdge R7515 running Windows Server and SQL Server, which we did last week, needed some refinement, I learned from an intrepid reader who reminded …

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• More IBM i Security Flaws Revealed

  July 13, 2022 Alex Woodie

  The summer slowdown might have started in your particular business, but things are just getting warmed up IBM security researchers, who disclosed a series of new vulnerabilities across IBM i products over the past couple of weeks, including IBM i Merlin, WAS Liberty, OpenSSL, the Digital Certificate Manager, and Zlib.

  On June 27, IBM disclosed that the collection of open source and proprietary tools and technology it’s brought together as IBM i Modernization Engine for Lifecycle Integration (Merlin) suffers from no fewer than 16 separate security flaws.

  Among the most series of these flaws is a CVE-2022-22965, a data binding …

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• Beware The Hype Of Modern Tech

  April 25, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Many IBM i shops are under the gun to modernize their applications as part of a digital transformation initiative. If the app is more than 10 or 15 years old and doesn’t use the latest technology and techniques, it’s considered a legacy system that must be torn down and rebuilt according to current code. But there are substantial risks associated with these efforts – not the least of which that the modern method is essentially incompatible with the IBM i architecture as it currently exists. IBM i shops should be careful when evaluating these new directions.

  Amy Anderson, a modernization …

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• Infor CM3 to Provide On-Prem Alternative to Cloudy M3

  April 20, 2022 Alex Woodie

  For years, Infor has been leading with the cloud when it comes to M3, the ERP system formerly known as Movex. But now, the software giant is readying a new hybrid deployment option called CM3 that will run in a Linux or Windows container and IBM i.

  Long before Infor completed its Lawson acquisition in April 2012 — even before Lawson finished its acquisition of Intentia in 2006 — plans were solidly in place to migrate the core RPG code underpinning the Movex suite to Java, thereby opening the software to run on platforms besides just IBM i, its historical …

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• What The Open Source Roadmap Holds For IBM i In 2021

  March 15, 2021 Alex Woodie

  2020 was whirlwind of a year when it comes to open source on IBM i, with many major new open source products coming to the platform. The roadmap for open source software in 2021 may not be quite as active as last year, but there will be some compelling new technology to play with, coming from IBM and the community, IBM’s open source guru Jesse Gorzinski tells us.

  “Last year was a pretty big year for open source,” says Gorzinski, whose official IBM title is senior business architect for open source software on IBM i. “In 2021, we’re going to …

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• MariaDB Now Available Via RPM

  December 7, 2020 Alex Woodie

  When it comes to databases for the IBM i community, Db2 for i is, and always be, number one. But there’s no reason to limit yourself to just one database, and now IBM is making it easier for IBM i shops to get their hands on MariaDB, which could be the number two database on the platform.

  MariaDB is an open source relational database that is a fork of MySQL. MySQL, of course, has been supported on the IBM i server for many years. But following Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems, which had acquired the company that developed MySQL, …

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• IBM i Tries On a Red Hat

  September 30, 2020 Alex Woodie

  When IBM initiated its $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat in 2018, it was done to prepare Big Blue for the coming wave of innovation around things like containers, AI, clouds, and next-gen workloads. It was generally understood that most of the benefits would accrue in the X86 space. But apparently the plan called for sizable doses of IBM i, AIX, and mainframe, too.

  Last week at COMMON’s virtual POWERUp conference, IBM’s Joe Cropper, who works in Power development and holds the title IBM Master Inventor, laid out how the Red Hat acquisition will benefit IBM i and …

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• Apache Kafka And Zookeeper Now Supported On IBM i

  September 9, 2020 Alex Woodie

  IBM quietly added support for two open source technologies, Apache Kafka and Apache Zookeeper, on IBM i. Both projects are critical elements of emerging distributed computing frameworks in the big data space, although they have very different uses.

  Apache Zookeeper is a core underlying technology for enabling distributed computing and ensuring that applications running atop Zookeeper are highly resilient. The software functions as a centralized service for keeping track of nodes in a cluster, and for synchronizing data and services among the different nodes.

  All of the nodes in a Zookeeper cluster have access to a shared hierarchical namespace. If …

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• New Option Emerges for Refactoring IBM i Apps

  August 19, 2020 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that want to refactor their RPG and COBOL applications into different languages have a new option available to them. In late June, Astadia and Blu Age announced they’re working together on a new service that automates the conversion of customers’ older apps into Java and .NET code that can run on X86 systems in your basement or the cloud.

  Based in Boston, Massachusetts, Astadia claims to have completed more than 200 mainframe migrations and more than 100 mainframe modernization projects over about two-and-a-half decades. The company has modernized millions of lines of COBOL code running on mainframes …

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• Man-DB Brings Documentation to IBM i

  August 12, 2020 Alex Woodie

  IBM i developers who have a question about how a particular command or feature works in open source packages now have an easy way to look up documentations, thanks to the addition of support for the Man-DB utility in IBM i, which IBM unveiled in late July.

  Man-DB is an open source implementation of the standard Unix documentation system. It provides a mechanism for easily accessing the documentation that exists for open source packages, such as the Node.js language, or even for commands, like Curl.

  The software, which can be installed via YUM, only works with open source software on …

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